


Death Be Not Proud

by Quixotikan



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24528502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quixotikan/pseuds/Quixotikan
Summary: Nicodemus will never forgive Baz for leaving him behind, helpless to prevent his sister's death.
Relationships: Snowbaz - Relationship
Comments: 13
Kudos: 8





	1. Smoke on the Wind

**Author's Note:**

> Have you ever wondered what happened to Nicodemus after he rescued Baz and got absolutely no gratitude in return? I always felt that Nico had a lot of potential, especially his backstory (I mean, why did he want to go tp the vampires in the first place, especially if he was already stellar at magic?) So naturally I was a little disappointed when he was never heard from again. This is where his story left off...
> 
> Enjoy!

NICODEMUS

When the Pitch bastard leaves me in a squeal of tyres, I decide it’s about time I found out just how fast a vampire can run. I sprint after his sports car, running like a maniac. It hardly registers that I’m in broad daylight running through London streets filled with Normals. 

Ebb and Fi had their doubts, but I was right about the advantages of Turning. The car doesn’t leave my sight for the first fifteen minutes, even though it’s speeding twenty miles over the limit. But bit by bit, I lag behind. 

By the time I get to Watford from Blackfriars Bridge, the White Chapel is in ruins and smoke is billowing from the shattered stained glass. 

The gates were clearly open before because three cars are parked in the snow on the other side, but no longer. Likely the Pitch brat spelled them closed just to spite me. I wonder if he saw me in the rearview mirror.

I’m about to test my strength on the gates when they fly open, and I stumble backward. They've opened to admit a girl running at me, full tilt. As she sprints past me, my nostrils flare. The journey was long, and I’m ravenous. My hand whips out and circles her wrist involuntarily.

“Where is my sister?” I snarl at her, hurling her bodily back toward the gates. They clang shut when they feel my presence; they know I’m not supposed to enter, but I’ll be staked before I let a bit of metal separate me from Ebeneza. 

The girl is shaking, and her eyes are wide, but her legs keep moving, churning the snow to slush beneath her even as I hold her in place. She’s a pretty little thing with long blonde hair and skin nearly as pale as my own. Her pulse is throbbing frantically beneath my fingers, and my bloodlust rises, filling my mouth with an acrid metallic taste. I grab her by the throat with my other hand and shove her back against the gates. I force her eyes up to mine.

At first all I see is a well-founded terror in her gaze, but then recognition flashes across her visage. “Ebb!” she gasps.

“Yes,” I return. “Ebb. Where is she?”

Her eyes roll skyward as if she’s trying to look behind her. Pinned as she is, she can only look up at the smoke slowly turning the sky black. “The White Chapel,” she tells me.

I loosen my hold on her neck but press her hand against the cool metal of the gate’s bars. “Open them,” I order.

Her fingers grip the bars, letting them feel her magic. The gates seem to hesitate for a second, as if they know she’s being coerced. Or maybe she’s just a weak magician. But they groan open, and I stumble forwards and through the wrought iron. 

She twists in my grip. “Let me go!” 

I do. We scatter in opposite directions, and I practically fly towards the blazing Chapel tower, running through the snow towards the light and smoke. 

Without warning, my knees give out beneath me. The whiteness of the snow, the haze of the smoke, the light like fire, the thunderous roar issuing from the broken windows of the tower swirl around me as I fall to the hard packed snow. I labour to draw breath from ragged lungs; a cold hand seems to have pierced my chest and set my heart on fire. I retch into the snow as a wave of nausea passes me. Ebeneza. _What has he done?_

Ebb and I are twins. Apparently, sharing nine months together with very little elbow room in a squishy, dark space is an incredible bonding experience, because twin magic is its own unique brand. It had its disadvantages - we both got in a brooding funk at the same time every month, among other things - but it came in handy other times. Ebeneza and I were always in tune to each other’s mischief. She always knew when I was in trouble, and I always felt it when she got hurt. 

That’s what it feels like now. As if I’ve been stabbed through the heart. 

I stagger back to my feet. There’s a thick haze of magic hanging in the air, and everything smells like smoke. Light is shining from the broken Chapel windows like a beacon. 

My head spins for a moment, but the knowledge that Ebb is dying blocks out all my other thoughts. And then I’m running again, clawing my way through the pain and noise and fear. 

* * *

There’s a room at the back of the Chapel, held twenty five feet aloft. It's a sort of attic, with nothing but a hole in the ceiling to get up there, and I curse myself for not dragging my hostage here to magic me through it. 

I run back to the Chapel entrance. In spite of my vampire strength, it takes precious minutes to drag the heavy wooden pulpit back to the room. I position it beneath the hole, take a running start, and vault off it. My fingers graze the edge, but I lose my grip and crash to the ground. Again and again, gravity pulls me back to the stone floors with merciless consistency, and all the while the pain in my chest is fading. 

I finally manage to catch the lip of the trapdoor. I'm through it in seconds. But before I even clear the hole, I know she's gone. The pain in my heart is replaced by a void. Even so, I rush to her side.

Her fingers are cold. Her staff lays by her side. Her blood is everywhere. 

I don’t let myself believe it. Ebb had more life in her than anyone; it can’t be all gone. She can’t be dead. We were destined for something more. We both were. She just wouldn’t listen. We could have gone to them together; they wouldn’t have been able to stop the both of us. We would have been untouchable. She would have been safe, and we would have been happy, and we could have taken down the Mage and ruled the world. If she’d only listened! She wouldn’t be here, and she wouldn’t be  _ dead _ . 

After a few minutes, I look around me. Her staff lays nearby; it seems to have rolled from her grasp. I pick it up and cast healing spells, even though I know it’s no use.

“ **Take a licking and keep on ticking** ,” I whisper, “ **Keep body and soul together.** ”

The magic is weak, and at first I think somehow all these years of disuse have atrophied the great well of power that I used to have at my disposal. But I can feel the swell of it in my stomach, vast as before. 

It’s not me that’s weak, it’s the spells. I haven’t kept up with the newer idioms and clichés, and these ones seem to have fallen out of the popular English lexicon. I curse Natasha for confiscating my wand. I curse myself for falling out of practice. But what good are curses when Ebeneza lies cold in front of me, already with the bloodless pallor of death settled over her?

I stay by her side for the next few hours in a silent vigil, falling into a sort of disbelieving, exhausted trance. The lack of her presence in my heart is so staggering that despite my vampire hearing, I hardly notice the sound of footsteps until they're nearly upon me. Someone has entered the Chapel.

I snatch Ebb's staff again and hurriedly cast a  **Nothing to see here** on myself before attempting to shrink back into the shadows of the room. There's nowhere to hide, really, with sunlight streaming through the broken glass.

I hear " **On love's light wings!** ” and an Indian woman rushes through the trapdoor. She rushes over to something on the other side of the room, and it is only then that I realize Ebb's is not the only body in the room. A girl, her daughter, it seems, is lying on her side, and the woman cries out, rushing to her. But I can hear the girl’s breathing; her mother’s worry is unfounded. I continue to turn, and I see two other prone forms. One is clearly the Pitch boy, his black hair and sharp features nearly the same as his mother’s, except Headmistress Pitch was never so bloodlessly pale. And beside him, a huge mass of red. It takes me a moment to realize that they’re wings, sticking out of the back of someone. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I stalk closer, keeping an eye on the woman, now bent over her daughter, casting a barrage of healing spells. As I get closer, I realize that Fi’s nephew has his hand stretched out, grasping the fingers of the winged boy. It’s his sidekick, the bloke who was with him back at the bar, the one with too much magic. I almost laugh; I should’ve guessed from the boy’s defensiveness that they were together. 

Suddenly, the Pitch brat stirs. His eyes snap open, and I freeze. His grey irises contract, and I know he can smell me. I should have remembered there was another vampire sniffer in the room; I should have known he could sense me with more than his eyes. 

Before I can decide to tackle him or leap away, the mass of red wings begin flapping wildly, and he shifts his gaze away to stare concernedly at his friend. I take the opportunity to pick my way to the other side of the room.

That’s when I see him. The Mage. The murderer of two of the most powerful mages of our time. How many more has he killed, I wonder, disguising the attempts as the attacks by the Humdrum? The greatest threat to magic is this man, this sorry excuse for a leader, this heartless serpent that believes only in the justification of means by their ends. I take a step towards him; I can’t tell if he’s asleep like the others or dead like my sister, whose blood has dried on his sword.

I’m shaking, trembling with rage and grief. He’s right here. Vengeance would be swift. I could tear his head from his shoulders with my bare hands. I could slit his throat with that bloody sword. Tear it out with my teeth.

I start toward him.

Someone beats me there. It's a young man  dressed in the Mage's ridiculous green livery. He's crying, choking out reviving spells. 

He’s dead, then. Now that I think about it, I can’t hear his heart beating. 

“ **Hold it right there!** ”

I startle, but the woman, now supporting her daughter, just continues to cast preserving spells at the Mage and my sister. “ **Oh please don't ever change / No don't you ever change** ”.

Investigators will swarm the scene in a few hours, and I can’t risk being found here, even if it means I might never see Ebeneza again. I start back towards her still form, telling myself to hold her one last time, to breathe in her scent of wood and goats and biscuits. The honeyed smell of her magic still hangs in the room. 

But the red winged dragon boy has gone to her side. I can't approach without risking notice.

I watch as his tears drip from his cheeks and make dark spots on her dirty scarf and woolen sweater.

I watch as he holds her.

I watch as he closes her eyes. 

And then I watch no more.

I slip past another of Davy's green-clad lackies, who jumps through the trapdoor from the pulpit I'd placed with the help of a " **Fly high like an eagle** ". I walk through the wreckage out into the snow. Here, facing away from the ruins of the Chapel, you could hardly tell that a disaster occurred here. Just the faintest trace of smoke on the winter wind.

It's only as I'm hailing a cab that I realize I still have Ebb's staff clutched in my grip. 


	2. Five Years Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Mordelia.  
> The glow of domesticity.  
> Baz gets a visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for continuing to follow our journey!!  
> ~Roz

MORDELIA

Summer break is drawing to a close, but I'll never get bored sitting on my brother's sofa watching Oliver and Sage play on the carpet. This new house of his and Simon's feels like a refuge from Hampshire, where the magic still pops and crackles. 

Despite all the magickal scientists’ predictions, the magic has refused to return in full. The hole began shrinking, but abruptly stopped last October. Since that winter, the hole has just squatted stagnant over Mum's garden and the northeast wing. 

But Father was determined to return. It was the family home, he said. He refused to abandon it. So we all moved back in and tried to ignore when the refilled bits fluctuated wildly, fading and snapping with sudden intensity. But it was ridiculous. Like trying to ignore a bloody electrical storm.

And the bloody reporters and scientists always conducting interviews and taking measurements like our house is some magical freak show. I just couldn't stand it.

I took the first opportunity I could to get out, and I've been staying with Simon and Baz for nearly three weeks. I wish I could stay longer. 

I've no desire to return to Watford. Baz always made it seem as if school was an adventure. Maybe it was, with the Chosen One as a roommate and a nemesis and secret crush or whatever. But for me it's just books and homework and useless idle chat and drivel. It's boring me to death.

When I complained to Baz, he suggested I fall in love with my roommate Chelsea. But Chel's already got a boyfriend. And I love it here. I don't want to leave.

Sage rolls on the ground and snuggles into the carpet. Oliver pokes her, but she's already fast asleep. Simon and I share a smile. He gently nudges the inquisitive older brother away and sweeps Sage into his arms. 

"Naptime," he says with a chuckle, making for the stairs.

Baz hums in agreement and picks up Oliver, swinging him into the air and eliciting a torrent of giggles. Baz laughs along, and it still surprises me how easy it sounds. 

There were years when I thought I'd never see that smile again. 

BAZ

I knew that when Simon, Sage, Oliver moved into the new house that the feeling of dizzying excitement would wear off eventually, by degrees. But doesn't happen gradually, as I had expected. The door chime sounds, and I prop Oliver on my hip to open the door. And then I go cold, as if every warm feeling has fallen straight out of my body. 

“Well, look at you,” he says. 

Vampires don't show their age the way humans do, but somehow he seems to have gained ten years over the five that have passed.

“What do you want,” I return, wondering where all my practiced chilliness from my days at Watford has gone. I’m dismayed to find that years with Simon at my side have melted the cold hard edge in my voice. I quickly throw up the mask of aloof unconcern, but I'm out of practice - I feel it slip for the briefest of moments. I can't tell if he noticed.

It’s ridiculous, really, to fear him. A vampire without fangs; a mage without a wand. But the presence of my son makes me vulnerable, and the risk to him isn't something I can stupidly ignore. I let my hand drift nonchalantly toward my pocket. At least I have the advantage of magic. 

He takes a step back, but the careless grin doesn't leave his face.

“Look,” he says. “I’m not here for a fight. I need your help.”

I sneer. “You’ll get none.”

Mordelia comes up behind me. She takes Oliver from my hands and swings him up onto her shoulders. He giggles, completely unaware of my concern. My sister, however, is not. She leans around me to see who it is, an expression of obvious suspicion coming over her features.

"Who's that," she asks. Nosy as ever.

"Someone who has absolutely no reason to be asking me for favors." I give him a pointed look. 

He gives me a gapped smile, never moving an inch. "I've found the spell," he continues, as if my message to leave wasn't perfectly clear.

"I'm happy for you," I say, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. "It is  _ too  _ unfortunate that you can't use it."

His grin widens, and I know I've stepped into a trap. He pretends to roll out his wrist, and a slender rod of wood appears between his fingers. A wand.

I resist the impulse to take a step back, and will my nerves to calm, meeting his gaze steadily. My fingers find my wand in my pocket. My mind is racing. "Where did you get one of those?" My internal panic forces my reflexes to finally kick in - my voice comes out deadly calm.

"It's just a piece from her staff."

Ah. The investigation never found Ebb's staff; the Coven assumed that the Mage had gone after her when she was unarmed. But Wellbelove had mentioned Ebb telling her to run; it must have been a compulsion spell, the way she refused to come with Bunce and I. And we'd all been too exhausted to see the danger of allowing that little mystery to go unsolved. 

A mage can't use another's wand unless related by blood. And no one thought twice about her stricken vampire brother. 

He's come for vengeance, that's all too clear. Simon is with Sage upstairs, and I need to warn him. Sure, Snow wasn't the one who killed Ebb, but who knows what twisted version of the story Nicodemus believes. It only follows that to go after the Mage's Heir, since the Mage himself is already in the grave.

The whole house has been spell proofed, if somewhat weakly. But if Nicodemus is anything like his sister, he's powerful, and he's knows it. He could have razed the building to the ground, lit it up, or made it explode like an overenthusiastic firework display without Simon or I having been any wiser. So he came to the door for a reason. There might yet be a way to get out of this not too much worse off.

"Tell me how I can get rid of you as quickly as possible," I say. It's a line I used to use on Snow when he'd come into our room and say my name without preamble. 

"I want you to bring back my sister."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No guarantees, but I'm trying to update every Wednesday! 
> 
> What do you think will happen next?
> 
> Please leave me comments!! I love responding to everyone!
> 
> ~ Roz


	3. Necromancy Is Illegal, You Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mordelia is the sass master; Baz wants a distraction; childhood games.

BAZ

"What?"

It's not what I was expecting. I don't know what I was expecting. But it wasn't that. I clear my throat, trying not to look too flabbergasted. Nicodemus Petty, a dangerous magician and vampire, is standing on my doorstep with a wand asking me to bring back his dead sister, the goatherd, Ebb? This can't be happening. 

"Mordelia," I say, stalling for a moment to clear my head. "Take Oliver upstairs would you?"

Someone needs to warn Simon. Petty's clearly gone round the twist. Whatever happens here, it's not going to be pretty.

I grab Mordelia by the wrist before she can go. I trace words on her palm:  _ Take Simon and Oliver out back. I don't know what he wants. _

It's a game we used to play, tracing spells on each other's arms. I only hope the years haven't dulled her knack for it.

Her eyes widen a tiny fraction, and I see the fear in her eyes. But then she smiles. "Brother dearest," she says, giving Nicodemus a once over, "you have the oddest acquaintances." She shakes her head. "Necromancy  _ is _ illegal, you know." And then she disappears from the doorframe with my son. It's all I can do to not breathe a sigh of relief. 

"You want me to bring your sister back to life." I still can't believe it.

"Yes." His expression is eager; he looks like a kid on a field trip. (A bloodsucking delinquent kid on a field trip.)

"If I could bring back the dead," I sneer, "my mother would be here right now, and you'd be nothing but ashes." 

The light in his eyes isn't epiphany. It's madness. 

"No!" He spits. "You can, and you will! I told you I should have come with you, and you didn't let me. You bastard, I could've saved her!"

"Please lower your voice, Petty, the neighbors are staring."

"Then maybe I should give them something to look at, you brat!" He grabs me by the collar, and I have to give him credit -- he's stronger than he looks. But I have to fight to keep a grin off my face.  _ Just punch me, old man _ , I think.  _ This is just the sort of distraction I need. _

MORDELIA

"What?" Simon blinks at me.

"Take Sage out the back," I repeat.

"Mordelia, what's going on? Where’s Baz?” He tries to push past me towards the living room, but I block the way.

“Please go,” I plead. “Baz doesn’t know what he wants.”

“He?” His wings are flapping a bit, and he’s shifting on his feet.

“Simon, I’m just relaying the message! Take Sage, and let's go!”

He lifts her gently from the crib and holds her out to me. “Take them both."

I set Oliver down and look him in the eyes. "Ollie, we're gonna play a game. Whoever reaches the backdoor first wins. Okay? Just wait one second."

I hug sleeping Sage against my chest. "Okay -- one, two, three. Go!!"

Oliver tears off down the hall, and I follow behind, trying not to jostle my niece. I glance back towards Simon as I reach the back door, but he's already headed towards his husband.

"I won! I won!" Ollie jumps up and down, as I nudge him outside.

"Yes, you did. Now come on, we're going to play another game."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for following along! Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I try to respond to all of you lovely people :D 
> 
> I'm going to be intermittent for a while because I'm going to be in the mountains on a long distance backpacking trip for a few months, so I won't have regular internet access. I hope that you'll stick around though for the next installment of this crazy ride of a first fanfic!
> 
> Thank you all so much for your support!!
> 
> ~ Roz <3

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work here on AO3, so thank you so much for reading! Tips and suggestions are greatly appreciated
> 
> Stay tuned for the next chapter!!
> 
> ~ Roz


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